Important Innovations Collection

Circling Stars Gave It Away to Astronomers Source:  European Space Agency A Black Hole "In Our Neighborhood" European astronomers have found the closest black hole to Earth ever discovered.  It is so close that two stars circling it can be seen with the naked eye.  The black hole is called the HR 6819 triple system.  It was created by the death of a fleeting young star.  Two remaining super hot stars continue to orbit it. Trillions of Miles From Earth It is the closest black hole discovered but it is still 1,000 light years away.  Every light year equals 5.9 trillion miles.  It was discovered by astronomers using the European Space Agency's massively powerful telescope at the European Southern Observatory in northern Chile.  Lead astronomer Thomas Rivinius says the black hole "is in our neighborhood".  He adds there may be 100 million to one billion of these relatively small but hugely dense objects in the Milky Way. Black Holes...

Discovery Accelerates Question  of Life Beyond Earth Source:  NASA Artist Rendering Planet Kepler-1649c Have astronomers found another Earth?  A team of  international astronomers have discovered a planet the same size as the Earth.  Like the Earth, the planet orbits its Sun Star. This exoplanet is called Kepler-1649c. Habitable The planet seems to have habitable regions.  It is  orbiting in its star's habitable zone.  That is a region around the star where a rocky planet could support water. Remarkable Discovery The scientists discovered the Earth-like planet while using reanalyzed data from NASA's Kepler space telescope. Kepler was retired in 2018.  Previous scans of the data with a computer algorithm misidentified the space object.  Astronomers taking a hard look recognized it to be a planet. Space Specifics The planet is 300 light years away from the Earth.  Of all the exoplanets ...

Oumuamua - Faraway Message Source:  NASA/ESA Hurtling Through Space Astronomers call the tumbling space object Oumuamua.  In Hawaiian,  that means a message from afar. That's what it certainly is.   Oumuamua was first discovered in 2017.  Some scientists thought it could be a vestige of some sort of alien life, because everything about this space object is so unusual.   New Discoveries and Findings Two astrophysicists, Yun Zhang at the  Observatoire de la Cote d'Azur in  France & Doug Lee at U-CAL in the US, have different findings. They believe that the reddish- colored, cigar shaped object tumbling through our solar  system is the fragment of a wrecked planet that got too close to the star it was orbiting around. The gravitational force of the star destroyed the planet and the  fragment is among the pieces that are left. First Arrival Oumuamua is the first o...